Author: zy1193

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

Chimamanda’s purpose is not to scold her audience for a lack of knowledge, but rather to explain that these misunderstandings and limited perspective are universal. By opening with her own admission in the tale about Fide and his family’s poverty, she opens herself to the criticism of this talk. It makes her a more human narrator, and also adds humor to the story in a way that helps the audience feel like she is a close friend, not merely a lecturer. In your own presentations, show vulnerability. Make yourself relatable to the audience by describing a time when you didn’t have your business plan figured out, or perhaps a time that you’ve struggled with in the past. Human experience is a flawed experience.

The purpose of this TED talk is to encourage us to broaden the scope of stories we consume about other people and cultures. But this isn’t a high-level talk that spells out why this is important using stats and facts; it speaks to the heart by using storytelling examples. Listening to the talk, Chimamanda uses around ten different smaller stories to share the core message itself. All of them fit beautifully together, combing her personal experience as a Nigerian in America as well as her Nigerian experience with its own limitations in literature and so on. If you want to make your presentation compelling, use storytelling to show your audience what you mean, don’t just tell them what they should do or know.

Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~zy1193/project2/project2.html

Design

We wanted to record some sound that we meet every day around us. So we decided to record the sound of making coffee, the metro, the street noise, the shared bike and the billiards in AB. As only one sound can be heard at a time, we were curious about what’s the effect when they mix together, so we want to make several buttons to remix them together, which can give you feedback, let you know what sounds do you mix.

Process

When we record and edit the sounds, we didn’t meet any big problem, the quality of sounds is good, my partner uses some app to make the sound more recognizable.

However, when it comes to the coding part, the problems emerge. First, I used the javascript to make the button concave and convex as feedback for the users. This process is pretty smooth. Second, I wanted to make a volume bar under each of the buttons, when I made the first one, it worked. But when I tried to copied and pasted the function for the other one, it failed. I tried many times and due to the time limit, I chose to give up this part. Third,  when I deleted the volume bar coding maybe I do something wrong, the whole coding didn’t work just the night before the due.

Reflection

It’s really important to make some screenshots when you are coding to record some important code so that if you mistakenly do something wrong, you can know what went wrong and fix it in time.

 In ‘The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,’ Jonathan Lethem discusses the nature of plagiarism and what plagiarism has done to today’s creative society. Lethem questions whether Nabokov’s novel was a result of influence from Lichberg’s version or whether he made specific and intended references to Lichberg’s novel.  Lethem is attempting to figure out how writers, artists, photographers, videographers can produce original artwork when they are simultaneously being influenced by so many different factors. The common phenomenon is that many artists and writers borrow from each other and “plagiarize”  different aspects of art. 

One sentence that really caught my attention is that when you simply accuse people of plagiarism “you attack the next generation of creators for the crime of being influenced. They make the world smaller” (Lethem 65).  It makes me thinking that plagiarism cannot be regarded as a black-and-white issue because, in some way when we borrow someone else’s work and incorporate it into our own work, we also create something new and provide more masterpiece to the society. If we only focus on the originality, we may miss the chance to create many valuable artworks, which usually at first are inspired by someone else. Overemphasizing the ownership and the copyright, on the contrary, will limit the new generation of artists. There are many things that are undiscovered, according to Lethem, and if we just pull little bits and pieces of information from other areas, there is much to be discovered and made.

As the development of movie and TV series, people have slowly been reducing how much they heard this kind of audio without frames. So when I first heard this episode of the audio, I feel somehow uncomfortable because when you can’t see the picture you must be very focused because you don’t just need to listen but also to imagine the images in your head on your own. If you are just as careless as you watch a movie,  you will miss a lot of content.  So later I tried to focus on some sounds we often hear in our daily life but did not pay much attention to, such as the sound of the fish bubbling in the aquarium, or the clatter of plates in a noisy restaurant. These kinds of sound are what I think I recognize in the audio. At the same time, I was thinking about whether there will be someone else imagine the same picture as me. Perhaps different people have different personal experience and different insights towards the sound, so the images emerge in their head may not be the same.

 I think audio still has its unique charming. Changes in pronunciation and intonation can show the speaker’s emotion and even the characteristics. Like  Walter may be a little nervous while Colin is pushy, intense, and mansplainy. However, I am still not used to listen to the audio without other digital media. I think if the audio can be served with some visual effect, the audience will get a better experience. I know that homecoming also has a TV series, I think it will be a totally different feeling, the facial expressions and the real scene may help me understand the storyline better I think.